Interview: Mark Armstrong of John Ferdinand

We had the pleasure of interviewing jewelery designer Mark Armstrong (of John Ferdinand). Mark takes us through the process of creating a piece; from inspiration to final collection.

FI:. What is your concept behind John Ferdiand?

MA:The concept behind John Ferdinand was to create a contemporary
lifestyle brand for the global nomad. We’re starting with jewellery,
but we plan to do leather goods and other items in the future.
Initially we planned to solely target men but interesting, many women
really like our jewellery collection too so we broadened our
definition a bit and arrived at the “global nomad” as our perfect
customer. We’re still designing mostly for men but gotta keep the
women happy as they’re a really important core of our fan base
already.

FI: Where do you get your inspirations from?
MA: I get inspired by urban life in Hong Kong, where I’ve lived for 15
years.. but also from our travels around Asia. I go to Bali every
couple of months to visit our workshop there and just chill out and
recharge the batteries. Bali is incredibly inspiring. I’ve even been
inspired by white river rafting there.

FI: What city/location do you get the most influence from?
MA: Hmm thats a tricky question. I guess Hong Kong, but Bali is always in
the back of my mind. Hong Kong has such a wonderful energy and
modernity to it, and visually its quite inspiring — and more often –
overwhelming. Bali is right at the other end of the spectrum, way
more creative and colourful, and everyone there is just so lovely and
creative. Our aim is to blend the influence from those two worlds to
create something beautiful.

FI: What is your process in creating a piece?
MA: We start with a mood board, basically a pasteup board with imagery
from magazines.. it defines the visual style for the collection, the
mood, the colours, sometimes even a place or era in the world, and
textures and forms. This is really the starting point. From that, I
dream up a 3 dimensional form on paper, and make a model. At this
stage its really looking at proportions and how things work on the
body. From there, I extend the concept across the range of items to
create a collection, juggling the proportions and cleaning up the
concept so it presents as a unified collection. Then we have a list
of items and we take a very hard look at them and edit out the items
which don’t seem as strong, or dont work, or dont add anything to the
collection. Our collections are very tight and focussed. From those
drawings I think about colour and materials, and go to my workshop and
then being a whole collaboration process to figure out what is
possible, how it will be made.

Once the workshop is started on it, they make wax models which we
approve, and they make moulds and masters and cast the items to create
samples. Once we’ve approved or refined the samples, then we move to
production. From concept to production is about 3 months. We’d like
to get that down to 6-8 weeks but already we’re way ahead of the
development curve most fashion brands are working on much longer cycle
times.

FI: How did you decide to only use sterling silver and ebony, have you considered using other materials?
MA: When we sat down to write the business plan we did a list of materials
we loved and hated. Wood and silver were on the “love” list. We
love silver, it looks modern, its relatively easy to work with and
more affordable than gold, although the price of silver is up a lot
too. We’re also looking at platinum-silver alloy too in future. We
ended up using ebony because our workshop had experience with it, and
its very hard and stable, and has a gorgeous grain. Its really
perfect. The problem is its a rainforest timber, so its endangered.
We’ve got a great sustainability story though, the wood we use is from
plantation timber, as is actually offcuts from furniture making. Its
stuff that would have been thrown away. We love being able to say
this, people really care about sustainability now, and its a really
important part of what we do.

Right now we’re finalising some very limited edition bracelets for
women in leather, with silver panels inlaid with mother of pearl and
antique kimono fabric. Its part of a collaboration we’re doing with
Kazumi Nakanishi from Chako (www.chakotkyo.com) who does fabulous
one-off bags. We’re doing the bracelets to match Kazumi’s bags.
We’re both tremendously excited about that. We’re launching those in
a few weeks.

The next collection which should go into production in April is using
silver and inlays of snake skin, and possibly other fabrics or
materials if we can solve a few technical issues. There’s a very
long list of materials we want to use.. and not enough time to get to
them.

FI: How do you feel designing jewelery differs from designing clothing?

MA: Jewellery design to me is way more emotional than clothing design.
There’s a real mystical element to jewellery design. People are
really buying an emotion, a memory of a time or a place or a person.
We have customers who tell me they NEVER taking their John Ferdinand
pieces off. They even go hiking in them. There’s something
incredibly timeless about good jewellery. People buy jewellery to
ground themselves, to connect with something very deep inside their
soul. They’re really connected with the pieces, and even the back is
important, something that only the wearer will see or know about. if
you study the history of jewellery you can see it has always formed a
very important symbolic and totemic part of people’s lives.

Clothing design on the other hand is much more trend and fad driven,
and of course its very practical. We need to wear clothes. I’ve got
a book on jewellery from the Victorian era which I, and most of my
friends would wear in a heartbeat. I doubt we’d wear the clothes from
that era though.

So I think jewellery is often about helping the customer connect with
some internal motivation, like remembering a loved one, whereas
clothes, to me are a more external motivation for the customer. They
want to good or show off some particular label. People seem more
concerned about being fashionable in clothes. In jewellery, at least
from speaking with our customers, its much more internal, more private
and personal. Its about being grounded and feeling whole, in harmony,
or perhaps nostalgic.

FI: Starting a new business must be quite a headache.. what’s on your mind?
MA: Right now our biggest challenge is getting broader retail exposure and
distribution. We’d love to hear from any independent boutiques and
retailers who are keen to carry our collection. Right now we have
zero retail exposure in the US market so we’ve got a lot to do to get
the brand out in front of people. Our collection is really tactile
and people need to see it for themselves.
To see for yourself.. check out www.johnferdinand.com